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PARIS — I met someone over the week-end and in lieu of making like Albert Camus watching his telephone for four hours on a dreary autumn afternoon in his pad near the Luxembourg Gardens in 1944 waiting for Maria Casarès to call, it occurs to me that the best way to retain the sensation or feeling this girl provoked — even if it ultimately has to move on to someone else, because I have no idea whether I did the same for her — is not to evoke the details of the encounter itself in this forum (which might rightly put off the woman in question, even if I don’t know whether I’ll ever have the opportunity to tell her face-to-face the effect she had on me, preferable), but to flash back to the last time I experienced this sensation, in junior high school. Then at the least I’ll be able to retain this ability to be almost instantly smitten by a girl — which I’ve not experienced for 22 years — even if I never hear from the woman who triggered the sentiment this weekend again and the feeling ultimately has to migrate to someone else. (In which case I’ll just see “La Strada” alone this week.) If I’m aware that I’m taking the risk of alienating her by making the visceral reaction I had to her public even in this veiled manner, sharing a junior high school memory still seems a lot more innocuous than Camus’s coping mechanism in 1944-45, grappling with his own impotence in the face of a retreating Casarès by writing about a Roman tyrant who kills everyone in sight to prove he’s not powerless against fate after his sister-lover dies.

Her name — I mean the junior high school flame — was Felicia French. It seems that my mom must have already known her mom when they introduced us in the Glen Park recreation center nestled in Glen Canyon in … 1974. Typical for San Francisco — and the girls I had the tendency to fall in love with then — she was a mix of white, black, and Latino, with big luminous Nathalie Wood eyes under her frizzy bunned hair. “Crush” is the closest I can come to describing the sensation, which was/is pure — nothing to do with sex, everything to do with the heart warming over as if stirred by a gentle wind. Boulevarsé quoi. And it’s almost entirely centered on the effect the girl’s visage — and manner, in the simplest of gestures — has on me. (Fortunately, the activity over which we met this week-end provided a convenient excuse for looking her in the eyes; not that I was able to keep it up for long. And I’ve probably already said too much.) It’s a sensation that’s completely innocent; there’s no fantasizing of “la suite,” of a physical escalation. Not even the urgency of “I want to be with this person”; one is simply enchanted and entranced. Tongue-tied, stiff, and awkward. Even the little things the girl (or woman) does have this attenuated allure. And if she looks at you, forgetaboutit it. (I practically floated down to the Seine afterwards and when the Eiffel Tower started scintillating, it seemed a natural expression of what was going on inside of me. Now I’ve really said too much.)

So let’s get back to Felicia French. And to Nathalie Wood. A year after our Glen Park encounter, transferring to my local junior high, James Lick, I found myself acting opposite Felicia in a Tennessee Williams one-act which the author would later expand into a full-length film starring Nathalie Wood, “This Property is Condemned.” In the one-act version, a 14-year-old girl balances on a deserted train track and talks a lot about her dead older sister, Alma (in the film, Nathalie), to an audience of one person, a boy, Tom, whose (thus, my) biggest line comes when the girl explains that the sister “is in the bone orchard.” “The BONE orchard?!” answers the boy, flabbergasted. (A bone orchard — the Catacombs, where all the ancient bodies in Paris are really buried, and where the Resistance met during the Occupation — also served as a sort of oracle to my encounter of this weekend: Et maintenant, mec, tu vas avoir la chance de faire quelque chose pour manifeste que tu n’es pas encore un squelette.) In the play (for which I won the Best Supporting Actor award in a city-wide junior high drama contest in which my opponent was a good friend from my previous junior high, Chip Williams, who by high school would announce he had a brain tumor and wouldn’t live past 20; what have I done, who have I loved — and who has loved me? — to prove that I have?), the Girl/Felicia sings a song which goes like this (didn’t have to look it up; imagine the words being sung in the wistful soprano pitch of a 14-year-old):

Wish me a rainbow and wish me a star,All this you can give me wherever you are;And dreams for my pillow,and stars for my eyes,And a masquerade ball where our love wins first prize.

Felicia and another girl, Linda Mull, liked to taunt me by singing “Soldier Boy,” replacing the title with “Monster Boy.” They even gave me a baby-blue tee-shirt with “Monster Boy” in black letters. This was at my 15th birthday party, which is about when I started lowering my ambitions, girlfriend-wise. Not even dreaming of trying for my dream-girl Felicia, I instead decided to go for a girl named Lisa Craib. It wasn’t that she wasn’t pretty — she was. But I think it was that she was the underdog — the other girls and boys teased her as being flat-chested — that made me think I’d have a better chance of interesting her than Felicia; less competition.

We were playing Truth or Dare in my basement bedroom near the ping-pong table — Felicia and Linda were there also, and, *I think*, even Tracy Wedemeyer, my very first girlfriend (we met in the maternity ward at Marin General). At one point — Tracy must have left (like her, Lisa had long straight blonde hair) — someone (was it Felicia? Did I miss another cue?) asked me this Truth question: “Who’s the girl in this room you like the most?” “Lisa.” When we were alone — the lights must have gone out because I remember assuring Lisa that the unzipping she heard was that of my sweatsuit jacket — Lisa confessed, “Remember what you said? If they asked me, I would have said you.” (This is not the only proximity ping-pong tables had with my pre-adolescent crushes. In 6th grade — when I was 11-12 — I’d dedicate my games over our basement table to Christine LaMar, my very first crush, ennerving my brother and best friend with my insistence on declaring before each match, “This game is dedicated to Christine LaMar. If I win this game, I will be … and …. If I lose it, I will be … and …..” By the time Christine broke my heart by announcing she was transferring to another school, I was able to pronounce, through tears, “… if I win ((sob)) I will be ((sob)) 187 and 9.” Which I did and was.)

Glen Canyon also figured into my Lisa love story; we’d gotten to second base locked in a laying down embrace (whence was born my adoration of the supple female tummy) at the bottom of the canyon, and it was at about that time that Lisa announced that her father — their house was above us on a lip of the canyon — was into guns. (I pictured him already having me in his sights, clutching his daughter.) In my yearbook Lisa would write, “Paul, As Fi (Felicia) says, You are the man of my life. I’ll never forget you.” (Felicia had written, “Have fun with beautiful Lisa.”) We tried to keep it up that summer — the summer before we’d go our separate ways for high school — but the decline started (fittingly enough) over a tennis court. Lisa, a city champion, complained that my game was bringing hers down… Our phone calls also deteriorated, with Lisa cutting the awkward silences with “What else?”

My telephone calls with Felicia, on the other hand, would last for hours, with my mother and brother yelling at me to get off the phone. Couple this with the memory of one particularly graphic dream of me she shared after one of us had told the other s/he was in the process of taking a bubble bath, and I sometimes wonder if I was completely dense in not even trying to make a romantic move. I was devastated when Felicia sent me a postcard at summer camp announcing she’d be going to a different high school, shortly after which around a campfire under star-strewn skies in the shadow of Yosemite I made a move, reciprocated, towards another girl, T.C. (she went by that acronym), and who I was not really attracted to. (And thus assumed would not reject me.)

I know the Felicias don’t always work out as Felicias. (Some of them even remain alone because no guy has the balls to move beyond the hopeless crush stage, assuming she’s unavailable. At about the same time in high school when I was doing — or not doing — this with another crush, Karen Sullivan, I read a story collected in his “Welcome to the Monkey House” in which Kurt Vonnegut, Jr writes about a girl so beautiful she remains alone, because men assume she’s unobtainable. I’ve had an actual relationship with one Felicia — it started out as a crush — in which by the end this “Felicia” of my dreams was showing up as a monster in my nightmares. And it was she who’d made the first move; the relationship would probably not have happened if it had been left up to me, as I’d have gone on considering her out of my league and beyond my reach.)

But I also know that if you don’t declare yourself — coupled with “Caligula” in the paperback copy I purchased for a buck this weekend at a vide-grenier or community-wide garage sale on my way down to the Luxembourg Gardens, Camus’s turf, shortly before meeting this current “Felicia,” was Camus’s “Le malentendu ” — you risk losing everything. In this case, the ability to dream. (I know, Camus probably didn’t have a publicly broadcast declaration in mind, but this is the message I need to send to the Universe right now to increase the chances that if it’s not the person I met this weekend, whoever it is will continue her route towards me.)

And the desire to continue to try to actualize those dreams. The sensation that meeting this woman provoked in me (I put it that way because I’m not saying she did anything express to provoke it) is a sensation that for the last 22 years I’ve only felt in dreams, only to wake up and discover the girl wasn’t real. Against that heartbreak I’ll take the disappointment of potential non-reciprocacity any day. And so even if I will be disappointed if I never hear from this girl again, I thank her for restoring my faith that I have the right to dream and to aim high, to not just settle, to demonstrate that je ne suis pas encore une squelette. And that I can still be smitten and stirred — on first sight — by the face, the eyes, the gestures and the sage words of a woman. Et par l’imperatif de toujours heed the chanson….

…la chanson de Felicia.

Wish me a rainbow and wish me a star,All this you can give me wherever you are;And dreams for my pillow,and stars for my eyes,And a masquerade ball where our love wins first prize.